Decorative Painting Ideas for Your Home - This Old House

Painting is a quick and affordable way to breathe new life into your home. From creative kitchen wall designs to adding visual interest in bathrooms, let these decorative paint(ru,bn,th)ing ideas inspire your next home decor project.

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1. Paint a Colorful Patchwork Floor

Transform a dull foyer into a stunning focal point with leftover paint and a creative vision. This patchwork floor design adds personality, character, and charm to any entryway. To create this look, homeowners Arlene and Seth Perlmutter followed these steps:

1. Clean the floor thoroughly.
2. Tape off uniform squares, allowing partial squares at thresholds.
3. Paint the majority of squares the same color as the walls.
4. Use different shades for remaining squares in a semi-random pattern.
5. Add white elongated petals using a hand-cut Mylar stencil.
6. Apply a protective top coat.

This unique floor design can withstand foot traffic and pets while adding a personalized touch to your home—without the need for expensive materials.

2. Roll On Faux Bricks

Create the illusion of a brick walkway without the hefty price tag of natural stone or cast pavers. This painting technique can give your concrete path a fresh, inviting face-lift:

1. Sweep and clean the surface thoroughly.
2. Prime with a concrete resurfacer for a smooth base. Let it dry completely.
3. Use a 4-inch roller to create “bricks” with terra-cotta-hued concrete paint.
4. Paint a border along both sides of the path for a finished look.
5. Fill the space between with a running bond pattern of 8-inch bricks.

Don’t worry about perfect lines or exact sizes—imperfections add to the realistic appearance.

3. Add Drama with an Oversized Pattern

For a unique and personal touch, consider creating an oversized floral pattern on your walls. This technique works particularly well in dining rooms or small powder rooms where a dramatic effect is desired. Here’s how decorative painter Brian Carter achieved this look:

1. Find a swirly floral wallpaper pattern for inspiration.
2. Simplify the design by tracing only the largest shapes to avoid overwhelming the space.
3. Transfer the drawing to the walls, increasing the scale dramatically.
4. Use a chalk line to create a grid on the walls for guidance.
5. Paint the design using regular interior latex paint and an artist’s round brush.

This whimsical effect adds personality and creates a one-of-a-kind space in your home.

4. Enlarge a Bath with Sideways Stripes

Contrary to popular belief, wide horizontal stripes can make a small bathroom appear bigger. “[These stripes] appear to ‘push out’ the walls, making the room look larger,” says Debbie Zimmer, a color expert at the Paint Quality Institute. Follow these tips to create this optical illusion:

1. Choose two closely related hues to maintain cohesion.
2. Apply the lighter color as the base coat.
3. Measure the wall height and divide by five to determine stripe height. (If you end up with an awkward fraction, add a little extra to the top and bottom bands to round off the number.)
4. Mark and tape off the stripes using a level for precision.
5. Paint alternating stripes with the deeper color.
6. Add black accents to give the pale colors a sophisticated edge.

This technique can dramatically change the perception of space in your bathroom, making it feel more open and airy.

5. Take Notes with a Chalkboard Calendar

This versatile chalkboard paint design allows for easy updates and customization, perfect for busy households. The hardest part is coordinating the taping: After you paint the first set of squares, pull up the tape, wait a day, and put down a new line of tape to do the next set.

To start, apply a base coat of standard gray chalkboard paint. Draw squares in pencil and tape them off neatly. Fill in three-quarters of the squares with different shades of light and medium gray for contrast, leaving the remaining squares the same color as the wall to break the pattern. When you’re done, allow the paint to cure for a couple days before use.

6. Bring Walls to Life with Tiny Twigs

Add a touch of nature to your interior walls with a delicate twig design. Interior designer Meridy King originally painted this paneled dining room a soft French blue with linen-white baseboards and chair rail. But something was still missing, so she turned to Carter for the finishing touch. The solution came in the form of gentle tree branches, a natural motif for a room with a garden view.

Follow these steps to get the look:

1. Paint the walls a soft color, such as King’s French blue.
2. Use baseboards and chair rail to frame the design.
3. Sketch gentle tree branches growing up from the floor.
4. Paint the branches using a natural, organic approach.
5. Allow leaves to bump against wall moldings for a framed effect.

This subtle yet impactful design adds depth and interest.

7. Check the Walls with Tone-On-Tone Color

Carter creates a warm and inviting atmosphere with a tone-on-tone checkered wall design. Here’s how to achieve this look:

This subtle pattern adds sophistication and warmth without being overwhelming.

8. Make Odd Seats Look Like a Set

Unify mismatched chairs for dinner parties and gatherings with a coat of paint and decorative decals. This technique creates a creative yet cohesive look for your dining area:

1. Choose chairs with flat backs for the best results.
2. Clean and sand the chair surfaces to prepare for painting.
3. Apply a base coat of paint in your desired color to unify the pieces.
4. Add decorative decals for a charming touch.
5. Seal the design with a clear protective coat for durability.

9. Use Stamps for Visual Interest

Carter suggests using homemade stamps to create a wall pattern for a unique, handcrafted look. This technique adds texture and personality to any room and can be easily customized to fit your style:

1. Make stamps using flexible craft foam and scrap wood.
2. Choose a base coat color and a contrasting color for the pattern.
3. Apply the base coat and let it dry completely.
4. Stamp the pattern at regular intervals across the wall.
5. Add smaller details between the main stamped elements for complexity.

View the complete step-by-step instructions at How to Create a Stamped Wall Design.

10. Glaze On a Bamboo Grove

Bamboo has been a popular design motif since the 18th century. But Carter had a fresher, cleaner look in mind when he updated this beige bath. This technique creates a serene and natural atmosphere, perfect for relaxation:

11. Pick a Pairing To Add a Blast of Color

Mark Chamberlain, a decorative painter and colorist in New York City, suggests energizing your space by pairing complementary colors from the color wheel. This technique can update traditional rooms or add vibrancy to contemporary spaces, depending on your color choices:

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12. Paint a Checkered Floor Design

Transform a plain wood floor with a painted checkered pattern, like Sara and Andrew Taylor did in their Massachusetts farmhouse. This Old House senior technical editor Mark Powers also used these techniques to create a similar floor in his own house.

This painted floor works well in bedrooms, sunrooms, or enclosed porches, adding a unique and stylish element to your home. View the complete step-by-step instructions at How to Paint a Floor.

13. Use Leftovers To Add Charming Details

Get creative with leftover paint to add unique details to a room. This approach is perfect for nurseries or children’s rooms:

1. Sketch your design in chalk on the wall for guidance. Stephany Kropman did this for her tree mural: “If you don’t like it, you just wipe and redo.”
2. Use leftover paint colors to create a focal wall or mural.
3. Add dimension with decorative elements.
4. Incorporate stripes or polka dots for additional interest.
5. Tie the design together with coordinating colors on adjacent walls.

14. Paint Candy-Coated Wainscot Stripes

Candy-coated wainscot stripes create a dimensional look on your walls. Start with a neutral base coat for a balanced look, then choose a secondary color for the stripes to create contrast. New York City-based decorative painter Alison Shapiro suggests outlining the stripes using a pencil, ruler, and plumb line for precision. Roll on wide stripes and add pinstripes with a small brush for detail. Mix the stripe color with latex glaze for a translucent effect.

This decorative painting idea works well in dining rooms, entryways, or powder rooms, adding a sophisticated touch to your decor.

15. Spruce Up Stairways With Carpetless Runners

Create the illusion of a runner on your stairs without the expense of carpet. This painted runner adds visual interest and is easy to maintain.

If you start with ivory-painted stairs, you’ll only need to add a few more details. Add two black stripes and two yellow stripes for contrast, then create a pattern of triangles and squares using templates. Paint the shapes using a stencil brush for clean edges and protect the design with polyurethane coats for durability.

I guess it follows that a child of the s is going to be an adolescent of the s and prey to at least some of the ills that might present: glue-sniffing, heroin, body-popping, bubble perms and, most perniciously perhaps, decorative paint effects. And I suppose there’s a certain inevitability to a delicate flower, one who really, really wanted to find a jar of Erno Laszlo skin formula in his Christmas stocking, succumbing to the last of these at some point in the epic series of Changing Rooms that is life.

It didn’t happen right away, as back then there was little scope for sponging or stippling or rag-rolling, those gateway finishes, let alone anything more advanced, such as scagliola or frottage (bear with me, please – I promise you this is a paint effect, besides also being something that two bachelors might venture to do in bed together). I was just a teenager – one with slightly odd obsessions, but a teenager nonetheless – and my parents were perfectly happy with their inoffensive ditsy wallpaper by Novamura*, if it’s all the same to you. But a boy could dream. And there was much to dream about, paint effects obviously being absolutely everywhere in the s, as a furtive flick through back issues of WoI from that decade attests.

Not just paint effects achieved with your actual dilute emulsion, artist’s colours and oil glazes either, but ‘paint effects’ as printed on to wallpaper for the lazy/time-poor, such was their popularity and near ubiquity. I recall poring over one of these – a hazy cloud pattern called ‘Seurat’ – in the Habitat catalogue of /83, having first eyed it with mad envy on the walls of a friend’s hall, stairs and landing. That same friend’s parents also had track lighting, a bead curtain and seagrass squares in their kitchen, which I mention just to emphasise the kind of people we’re talking about here.

As the name might suggest, ‘Seurat’ owed much to pointillism, the technique devised by that late-to-the-party Post-Impressionist, and was very, very pastel, to the point of probably being fairly ick (the company offered two colourways – rosé and azure, at £3.25 per roll! – and co-ordinating fabrics). It made the eyes go quite fuzzy, as if someone had smeared Vaseline over your pupils, or you’d spontaneously developed cataracts, or stepped into the soft-focus advert for Cacharel’s Anaïs Anaïs scent.

I was reminded of all of this tangentially when I saw Will Le Clerc’s charming Kent cottage in our December issue. Not that I imagine Will would stoop to sponging, stippling or stencilling, though I should perhaps point out that he has fashioned his own bobbin cornice out of polystyrene balls and toothpicks, inspired by one in Sir John Soane’s Museum. As for whether he’s ever dabbled with frottage, I wouldn’t know anything about that, sorry. But I can tell you that his home is really rather beautiful, from the ‘Willow Bough’-ed main bedroom to the sitting room with its faux-marble fireplace executed by him. Take those words in for a moment, if you will: faux-marble fireplace executed by him. My eyeballs swivelled from admiring his delft plates to the deft surround in question and immediately I was transported to the cover of a classic, The Thrifty Decorator, which showed something remarkably similar, conjured from ochre, raw umber and an oil glaze, I would guess. Now surely here’s a man who’s had a dalliance with Jocasta Innes (the author of said tome), I thought to myself.

I speak from experience. Not that long before the doyenne of dragging and distressing published that book, a successor to a great many practical guides by her, I was doing a postgraduate diploma in journalism and skulking around Spitalfields with a view to perhaps doing a piece about its nascent gentrification. Showing uncharacteristic chutzpah, and quite possibly emboldened by a lunchtime Cinzano, I decided to call in on her, knowing that she lived in a distinctive 18th-century house in Heneage Street, which she’d bought off the Spitalfields Trust in and had set about transforming with her ingenious decorative effects (WoI March ). It says much about her generosity and patience – or maybe it was just pity – that she gladly ushered a gauche stripling, a total stranger, in for a brief tour.

I remember little of the inside, which is odd for someone who normally has photographic recall of interiors, save for the chequerboard floor she’d painted on to the wooden boards on the landing and elsewhere. But I do know I was hooked. Things between Jocasta and me then became quite serious. Yes, I enrolled on a course held in the back room of her Paint Magic shop in Cross Street, Islington, somewhere near where Farrow & Ball now is. I seem to recall that the food writer Thane Prince was also in attendance, except the woman leading the workshop – not Jocasta, sadly, but one of her keen acolytes – didn’t quite catch her name when we were doing our introductions and so thereafter she became known to her as Thing. ‘Nice colourwashing, Thing,’ she would say, as we applied a top coat to the Shaker-style trays we were painting prior to rubbing back. ‘Easy on the beeswax, Thing.’

That tray became my apprentice piece and is probably responsible for what followed: a teeny-weeny flat in a Bethnal Green street yielding painfully slowly to the forces of gentrification, my home at the end of the s. No, not just my home – my canvas. One of those forces of gentrification was our friend and landlady, Liz, who charged us a mere £125 per month in rent, was heavily into auras and crystals and had worked her own ‘paint magic’ on the interior, with varying degrees of success: colourwashed floorboards, which were actually really rather nice; woodchip wallpaper sponged in a lemony yellow; skirting, architrave and louvre doors stippled in an arsenic green; and stencils (how she loved those stencils) in the same punchy shade. Think Swedish-country meets Santa Fe. The pièce de résistance – or so I imagine Liz thought – was the lilac ‘bedroom’ squeezed into what was a lean-to with a tangle of white muslin draped around a pole over the cabin bed, a confection so complicated, so Byzantine, I could only think that Kate Bush must have done it while rehearsing waving her arms around to Wuthering Heights. Anyway, as Oscar Wilde didn’t say, it was me or the lilac. One of us had to go.

Farrow & Ball’s ‘Etruscan Red’, still one of my all-time favourite colours, was chosen to usurp the lilac, but it felt too dreary, too meh, in that poky chamber. ‘We need more depth, more texture,’ I told my partner. Actually, what we needed was a demolition ball, or a deposit for our own place, but off I trotted to Jocasta’s Cross Street shop for a chinese-red colourwash to apply on top. Result: we now found ourselves sleeping in something resembling a playroom in a club libertin with a condensation problem. Meanwhile, I proceeded to attack the woodwork and doors: a base coat of ‘Etruscan Red’, a smattering of candle wax here and there, then a biscuity colour as a top coat, which I then furiously rubbed back and polished, revealing chippy patches where the wax had been. Distressed? It was and so was I, clearly.

That more or less marked the end of my long flirtation with decorative effects, save for a brief relapse during which I discovered Annie Sloan chalk paint, using it on an ‘Edgware-rococo’ lamp picked up from the junk shop in the arches off Brick Lane and – most notably – on a dresser going free on the streets of Zurich, when we lived there, which we somehow carted home across town on a tram and which became the focus of my brief fascination with frottage. Yes, frottage. It involves laying creased sheets of newspaper on to a surface of wet paint, then gently peeling them off to produce, all being well, a subtly distressed finish. Only I must have been suffering temporary colour vision deficiency, discerning soft shades of cream and grey evocative of old Parisian boiserie where others were insistent they saw purple. ‘It is quite… lilac,’ said a friend. I was crushed. Crumpled even, rather like the pages torn from Tages-Anzeiger scattered around my feet.

I squirm to think of all this now. But not half as much as I shudder at the atrocities committed in the name of upcycling, which are all too evident on Ebay and Facebook Marketplace – a teak G-Plan wall unit given a few maladroit coats of colourwash, as if that was somehow enough to turn it into an antique Provençal armoire; a distressed bit of scrapwood hung with a French-grey sign imploring us to ‘Live, Laugh, Love’. Or scream, scream, scream, perhaps. And yet I still can’t help myself. Currently bookmarked on my laptop is Jonathon Marc Mendes’s Youtube channel, Painted Love. As well as being a hairdresser, Jonathon is also a highly skilled decorative artist, adept at faking sandstone, rust, marble and layers of patina – you name it – with brush, paint and spray bottle. You could call his videos ASMR for a weary soul. That or, in my case, a very slippery slope…

*Novamura had a peculiar spongy feel a bit like rolled-out polystyrene and could easily be dented with a thumbnail, thus offering the same sort of illicit sensory thrill as bursting bubble wrap or plunging one’s hand into a Kilner jar of dried lentils. To this day I don’t know what its real advantages were.

For more on decorative paint effects, peruse ‘The Pauper’s Homemaking Book’ by Jocastas Innes; ‘Paint Magic’ by Jocasta Innes; ‘The Thrifty Decorator: A DIY Guide to Style on a Shoestring’ by Jocasta Innes; ‘Kevin McCloud’s Complete Book of Paint and Decorative Techniques’

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